Nerhood Weblog

Here is a great video that Fern forwarded to me. It is amazing how closely this guy nails the trials of bedtime.

According to Wikipedia a sparkline is a

“small, high resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images … Whereas the typical chart is designed to show as much data as possible, and is set off from the flow of text, sparklines are intended to be succinct, memorable, and located where they are discussed. Their use inline usually means that they are about the same height as the surrounding text.”

A group has released an open source add-in for Microsoft Excel called TinyGraphs “that creates sparklines, mini column graphs, and area graphs from a row of data. It generates beautiful tiny graphics that are as small as a cell and is useful for visualizing large quantities of data, such as stock prices and exchange rates.”

While I have yet to actually use the add-in it is something that I definitely can see using in a number or reports that I generate at the office.

Well after almost a week of being offline, I’m back. Sorry for the unannounced downtime, but I need to totally upgrade my sever and it has taken awhile to get things back on line. I think most everything is working (I still need to fix some things with the gallery, but the pictures are now displaying). Don’t expect much in the way of new content though, I haven’t had the urge to write here lately, but who knows.

I finally did, I finally ran 100 miles. I completed my 100th mile on Tuesday. I wish I had gotten to this mark sooner, but hey better late than never. It took my 37 runs with and average distance of 2.7 miles and and average pace of 10′04″ minutes per mile.

Here’s to the next 100.

Supposedly that is what I am, a Supreme Nerd God. At least according the NerdTests.com Here is how I rated:

Overall, you scored as follows:

3% scored higher (more nerdy),
0% scored the same, and
97% scored lower (less nerdy).

What does this mean? Your nerdiness is:

All hail the monstrous nerd. You are by far the SUPREME NERD GOD!!!

No I didn’t cheat, and yes I’m slightly embarrassed at my score. So I challenge you, my loyal readers to take the test, post your results, and let your nerdiness all hang out.

I have only one thing to say about this product, “How did I ever live without it”. If you manage more than one Microsoft Windows Server then you definitely need to be using SB EventLog Monitor.

So what does SB EventLog Monitor do that is so great, it collects, collates, and reports via a web interface upon Microsoft Event Log data. The UNIX world has had syslog forever and a ton of tools to help you manage the logging data generated by servers. I’ve even tried to shoehorn Microsoft Event Log data into some of those products, but it was never a good fit. SB EventLog Monitor allows you to quickly and easily manage and analysis what is going on across all of your servers. It allows you to quickly and easily view and filter error messages from different servers and identify patterns. This is particularly useful with dealing with multiple servers across slow WAN links.

It collects the Event Log data either via a Microsoft VB script that use WMI to collect only the new events or via an agent that you can install on your servers. The other requirements are MySQL, PHP (5.0+), and a web server (apache, IIS). While the install is geared towards running everything on a Microsoft server it is possible to run the database and web server on Linux. In fact that is what I did. The install is really pretty easy, so if you are looking for a relatively simple way to increase the manageability of your servers, then I strongly recommend that you take the time to install the open source SB EventLog Monitor.

If you are anything like me you probably have little to no documentation on your servers. Probably it is because you don’t have the time or the personal to perform the tedious (and boring) work required; you know it is important, but other things seem to take priority. Well, you no longer have any excuse for not getting it done.

SYDI (Script Your Documentation Instantly) is an open source solution that will document your Windows Servers, MS SQL Servers, and Exchange Organizations. It is a fantastically easy product to use. In its simplest form, it will query an individual server and produce a Microsoft Word document detailing the hardware, software, networking, user accounts and storage settings with a table of contents and loads of other useful information. With a little extra work, you can have it query all of your servers and produce a set of XML files that can be converted in to HTML documents (using an included script) that makes publishing a breeze.

Using SYDI is really simple; it is just a VBS script that is launched from a command prompt. You do need to have Microsoft Word installed on the workstation if you want it to produce the documentation in that format. The software is written by an IT Consultant named Patrick Ogenstad. He has posted some really good how-to guides on his site.

I highly recommend that you take a look at SYDI and use it to help jump start you server documentation project. I did and in about 30 minutes I had published our server configs on our Network Management server.

While browsing through the depths of Sourceforge I ran across a number of different software packages that really caught my attention. I will begin looking at them in more depth over the next couple of days. I hope to write some reviews of the packages. If you’ve used any of the following software packages I’d love to hear you experience, or if there are ones that you think I should look at then please leave me a comment.

• SYDI - Network Documentation Project - SYDI is a project aimed to help system administrators in getting started with their Network Documentation. It can document Windows Servers, MS SQL Servers, Exchange Organizations and Linux systems.
• phpMSAdmin is a tool written in PHP that allows you to administer a Microsoft SQL Server through a web browser, without the need for Windows or the proprietary Enterprise Manager. It allows you to create/modify: databases, tables, views, triggers, etc.
• SSLBridge An AJAX enabled Samba web GUI that provides users access to corporate documents without any specialized hardware or software clients.
• RackMonkey is a web-based tool for managing racks of equipment such as web servers, video encoders, routers and storage devices. Using a simple interface you can keep track of what’s where, which OS it runs, when it was installed, who it belongs to etc. RackMonkey is open source software licensed under the GPL.
• Davenport is a servlet-based WebDAV gateway to a CIFS network. This allows you to access Windows/Samba shares using any web browser. WebDAV clients (such as Windows Web Folders) can upload and download from the shares as if they were local folders.
• Clonezilla is a partition or disk clone software similar to Ghost. It saves and restores only used blocks in hard drive. By using clonezilla, you can clone a 5 GB system to 40 clients in about 10 minutes.
• Detritus is a package of programs for aiding power users or systems administrators in finding, and as needed trimming or deleting, the variety of useless files that Windows accumulates, such as tmps, caches, logs, . . . that the MS Disk Cleanup misses.
• openSIMS is a Security Infrastructure Management Systems that ties together the open source tools used for security event management into a common infrastructure. These tools include NMap, Snort, and many others. The best way to experience openSIMS is by downloading the openSIMS liveCD.
• php-AD-admin will allow users to update their own AD attributes ( phonenumber etc ) and reset their own passwords. This will improve the quality of the data in your Active Directory by forms validation to create new users/groups etc.
• PasswordNotify This tool monitors your Active Directory or OpenLDAP server via LDAP on a daily basis, and sends emails out to users who’s account are about to expire. Notification timing, messages, and frequency can all be customized with multiple profiles.
• FWNUA (Free Windows Network User Accounting) runs silently in a Windows login script and collects data about user logins. It allows more freedom in standardized computer naming. FWNUA keeps track of the workstations so you don’t have to!
• ManagePC is a tool for remotely administering & controlling XP/2000 machines in an Active Directory environment. It retrieves data on the hardware and software, lets you control currently running services and processes and much more.
• Active Directory Browser (AD Browser) is a remote browser tool for viewing, managing, personalizing Microsoft(c) Server Active Directory(tm) User accounts. AD Browser could also be used as a LAN Chat application within Enterprise (Company).
• Weyland is a tool that collects information about a switched network, presents the information in a convenient format, and displays a graph of the spanning tree of the network.
• DAD is a Windows event log and syslog management tool that allows you to aggregate logs from hundreds to thousands of systems in real time. DAD requires no agents on the servers or workstations. Correlation and analysis is driven through a web front end.
• SB EventLog Monitor is monitoring and consolidating Windows EventLogs. Events are collected from server using VBS and WMI or by Windows agent. Events are parsed using PHP and YOUR rules and are stored in MySQL database. Email alerts are supported.
• Pandora FMS is a distributed monitoring and performance Free System. It supports many OS and can monitor applications, services, network daemons, SNMP, OS parameters, and much more.

Guess who took home 1^st Place for her grade level. Ellie did! She did a great job and worked really hard putting it all together. Ellie and Fern have been working on it for the last two months, usually a couple of nights each week. Ellie thought up the experiment (making gas with wet and dry ingredients), from something that she had done with one of her Grandmothers. She made a work book, draw pictures, wrote descriptions of what happened. She made a graph showing the results, helped put together the display board.

Last night at the awards ceremony, she was the first one called up and hard the biggest smile on her face. Every kid who did a project (it was not required) got a medal and the first place winner in each grade got a trophy. We were so proud!

On Wednesday, Ellie had her first experience running. I’ve been running for a while now, and Ellie has always seemed interested in what I was doing. So I recently offered the chance to go with me. On Wednesday night she took the challenge. We had a great time, we started off with some stretching, then out we went. She did great! We started off slowly and went basically one and half times around the block. Towards the end she started to hold her side a little bit, but she kept going. I was really proud of her. After we were done, she told me that she wants to go again.

Here is the graph of her run. She went ⁶/₁₀ of a mile in a little over 11 minutes. I look forward to running with her again.

So you’re upgrading your server and you need to either recreate all you network shares or you’ve moved data to another drive and you want to reshare your data. With a few simple commands and a little bit of excel you can quickly make this happen.

Net Shares Command

The first thing you need to do is get a list of your current shares. So on your sever open up a command prompt and type the following: net share > c:\shares.txt

This will generate the a test file called shares.txt with all of your shares listed. The unfortunate thing is that Microsoft for some dumb reason will sometimes split the results for a single share over two lines, but that is still pretty easy to deal with.

Cleanup

Open the shares.txt file in Excel. You will need to do a little clean up to get everything the way you need it. In the end you need to just three three columns of information. The first is the share name, the second is the location of the directory to be shared and the third is the remarks and/or description field. You can also use this time to modify any of the drive locations, etc. Here is an example.

Formula to Recreate Shares

So now that we have our information ready, we’re going to turn it into a DOS batch file that will create/modify our shares. The first step is use our shares information to create the necessary DOS commands. We’re going to use an Excel formula to do the heavy lifting. In this case we want to use the text in the first three columns to produce a single command that looks like this:
NET SHARE APPS=F:\Applications

The formula that you will need to place in Column D is as follows:
=IF(C2="","NET SHARE "&A2&"="&B2,"NET SHARE "&A2&"="&B2&" /REMARK:"""&C2&"""")

Now just copy and paste the formula into all of the necessary rows to complete your prep of the net shares commands.

Creating and Using the Batch File

Once you have verified all of your entries are correct. Copy the contents of your Net Shares column (Column D). Paste that into an empty text document, and change the extension to .bat. Now run your batch file while logged onto the console of the server and presto your shares have been recreated.

With a little work you can also use this script to delete and/or modify existing shares too.

Windows Server 2003 Gotchas

The way we have our network setup, we use NTFS permissions for controlling access to files, not the shares permissions. Microsoft Windows Server 2003 changed the default share behavior for the Everyone group. They removed the FULL access control on the share and changed it to READ, so in our case we just modify the formula to add the correct permission back. To do that we just tack the following to the end of the formula :&" /GRANT:Everyone,Full"

Time traveling via music is an amazing experience. I’ve been meaning to post about this for over a month now, but never seem to have the time.

Fern and the girls had left the night before for a girls trip back home to visit family and now it was nearing the end of the work day on that Friday when I received an email from an old friend. I hadn’t spoken to Molly in almost twenty years. We had been close friends back in high school. Late night talks on the phone until 2 AM (my mom still comments on those), long notes written and passed back and forth via mutual friends (because we went to different schools). We never dated, don’t know why, not that it matters now. She had just received her notice about her High School 20th Reunion and found me via Google. Anyway, we exchanged a couple of emails before I left to go home to an empty house. I had a lot planned for the weekend (and even got some of it done), but …

On a whim I had recently checked out of our local library a copy of Time Again… Amy Grant Live. So when I got home from work I dug it out of my bag, dropped it in the CD player, and cranked up the volume. The next thing I knew it was 1987. Thanks to Molly’s email I not only heard the music, but I was blown away emotionally. I don’t thank I would have felt the connection so deeply if I wasn’t slightly lonely with Fern and the girls being away, and without Molly’s email.

If you’ve been a fan of Amy Grant at any point in her nearly 30 year career, then this is must purchase CD. She plays some of her best songs in a live event that is extremely well produced. If you want to know more about Amy and her music, then be sure and check her out at www.amygrant.com

I have recently become addicted to this online ski jumping game called Trysil Twintip. The background music is a little annoying after the 50th time.

Right now my highest score is 386,632. I’ve seen someone with scores over 800K. I don’t know how he does it. Anyway I highly recommend that you check it out, and if you do please post your score as a comment.

Update: My new highscore is now 549562

One of the great things about NetApp is that you can actually run fully functional Data OnTap Simulator of their storage appliances on any UNIX machine. It is a great way to test their product suite and demo up solutions before deploying to your production environment. I do have one minor gripe that is that you have to have a NOW account (NetApp’s Customer Portal) before you can download, and to get that you have to be a customer with registered product so evaluating before your first box arrives is impossible unless you can get you VAR to get you a copy.

Anyway, I’ve had a problem with the last couple of simulators that I have set up. When I create additional “disk” during the setup, they always come in as failed when actually start the simulator running. I first experienced this running as virtual machine on a VMWare server, and then on a actual hardware linux box. I was getting errors similar to the following:

Disk v4.28 Shelf ? Bay ? [NETAPP VD-1000MB-FZ-520 0042] S/N [66324112] has no valid labels. It will be taken out of service to prevent possible data loss.

I finally found a solution in the following comment on Scott Lowe’s blog entry about NetApp and ESX Server.

Once the simulator is running here are the commands that I use to get the disks back into a operational state:

>priv set diag
*>disk unfail -s v4.19

I repeat for each disk that I want to recover. When they are all unfailed, I follow that with a disk zero spares I’m not sure that is really needed but it guarantees that the disk are good to go. At this point I’m all set to use the disks however I want.

I ran across this great video titled “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us.” by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University that presents the concept of Web 2.0 in a very interesting and informative way.